Citation

Diprose R. Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative. Oxford: University of Oxford, 2007.

Copyright

(Copyright 2007, Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative)

The full document is available online.

Abstract

One of the greatest impediments to human security in the post-Cold War era is not inter-state wars resulting in mass destruction fought by the armed forces of nation states, but violence, perpetrated by individuals, groups, and state actors within the internal borders of nations. Violence, resulting from everyday crime, large scale communal conflicts, insurgencies, or through state repression can and does undo the development gains achieved in education, health, employment, capital generation and infrastructure provision. Violence is a public health problem, a human rights problem, a community problem, and a problem for the state and the international community. It impedes human freedom to live safely and securely and can sustain poverty traps in many communities. However, violence is not always an inevitable part of human interaction. Many multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and poor peoples manage human interaction and channel conflict and the propensity for violence in peaceful ways.

One of the problems for academics, policy makers, and practitioners working broadly in programs aimed at poverty alleviation (or more specifically in programs aimed at violence prevention), humanitarian responses to man-made crises, and longer term strategies to overcome structural inadequacies, is the availability of reliable data on the incidence, form, frequency, context, perceptions, and avenues of redress for the occurrence of violence. In particular, there is an absence of data which are comparable across country borders as well as socio-cultural and historical contexts. Many of the world’s experts working on poverty reduction and violence prevention in particular argue that there is an absence of reliable and comparable data collected at regular intervals over time which can adequately inform their policy and program design, as well as program monitoring and evaluation.

This paper proposes a survey module which can be incorporated to multi-dimensional poverty survey questionnaires so that data on violence is collected in conjunction with data on health, income and employment, education, vulnerability and risk, shame and humiliation, eudemonia and well being.